Junior High Schools

All four junior high schools in the Conejo Valley Unified District, two junior high schools in Santa Clarita and a Burbank junior high have been nominated for the California Distinguished Middle School Award, it was announced Tuesday. The schools were among 120 junior highs named as contenders for honors as among the most outstanding schools in the state. Sixty schools will be selected for the award.

Dawn Boldrin took note when a subdued Larry King showed up for her class at E.O. Green Junior High in Oxnard dressed in his school uniform without the flashy boots and makeup. The teacher heard he'd been roughed up the day before by boys put off by his effeminate manner. So, as she walked her eighth-graders to the computer lab on Feb. 12, 2008, she pulled him aside.

The Capistrano Unified School District last week unanimously voted to reclassify its junior high schools as middle schools. The change, effective this fall, amounts to a renaming of the schools; there are no immediate plans to change the grade configurations at any of the campuses. Under the new format, Marco F. Forster and Shorecliffs junior high schools will be called middle schools. In addition, Fred Newhart Elementary also will be designated as a middle school.

High school students already face a battery of standardized tests on their way to college. Now, the college testing frenzy is reaching into middle school. The College Board, which owns the SAT, PSAT and other tests, plans to introduce an eighth-grade college assessment exam in 2010, a top College Board official said this week.

A fingerprinting identification program for children will begin next Thursday at three Anaheim schools. The "Kids Identified at School" program, open to students in all Anaheim public schools, offers parents an opportunity to have children fingerprinted for security purposes. It is sponsored by the Anaheim City School District, Anaheim Union High School District and the Anaheim police. Parental permission to fingerprint a child is required, and all information and prints will be kept by parents.

Col. Larry Morden, dressed in military green pants and shirt, his khaki-colored hat perched at a jaunty angle, strides through the corridors of Pacoima Junior High School, ignoring the snickers of some students and smartly returning the salutes of others. He's going to be a few minutes late for his last class, the meeting of his unit of the California Cadet Corps, but he's not worried.

Isela Palomares, 16, of Pacoima dreams of becoming a doctor. Her parents, Mexican immigrants, support her goal but caution that it may be impossible. They don't have the money to pay for a college education. "They like the idea of me wanting to become a doctor but they don't think I can make it because of the money," Isela said. Their skepticism often discourages her. Sometimes, she said quietly, "I think it's impossible."

Eleven Arcadia youths have been arrested on charges of threatening to beat up students at three local junior high schools if they failed to pay a $5 weekly "protection" fee, police said Thursday. Officers were investigating a possible link between Asian-American gangs and the extortion suspects who allegedly targeted mostly Asian-American children, said Capt. David Hinig of the Arcadia Police Department.

The Los Angeles Board of Education gave the go-ahead Monday for several high schools to open their doors to ninth-graders, a decision that will affect thousands of students and expand a movement that is changing secondary education throughout the district. The board's unanimous vote allows seven Westside and San Fernando Valley high schools to make ther transition from three-year to four-year campuses.

David Turk doesn't like what he's learned about the annual fee he pays for school construction. Neither do some of his neighbors. As members of the Northbridge community, a new housing tract on the city's northern edge, they pay hundreds of dollars each year to a tax assessment district established by the Newhall Land and Farming Co. Turk pays $1,100 a year.

A student at an Oxnard junior high school shot another classmate Tuesday in front of two dozen other students who were settling into their first-period English class, police said. The 15-year-old victim was rushed to St. John's Regional Medical Center, where he was initially listed in critical condition. By day's end, his condition was described as improving. "He's gone from very critical to a little bit better," said Oxnard police spokesman David Keith. "He's actually communicating with personnel at the hospital.

An Orange County teacher has been arrested on suspicion of threatening to kill one of his seventh-grade students, police said Monday. Brian Christopher Wilcher, 38, of Orange was taken into custody Friday after an altercation in his classroom at Brea Junior High School during which he allegedly told the 12-year-old boy "something to the effect that 'next semester you'd better find another teacher because if you're in my class I'm going to kill you,' " said Lt.

An 11-year-old boy collapsed and died after running less than a lap during gym class at his Burbank middle school, authorities said Friday. Austin Anthony Cook, a sixth-grader at John Muir Middle School, was doing a standard fitness run on the outdoor track Thursday when he collapsed, said Joel Shapiro, a deputy superintendent for the Burbank Unified School District. Shapiro said Austin was known to be athletic and in "excellent physical condition."

A teacher at Stevenson Middle School in East Los Angeles has been arrested on suspicion of molesting five teenage girls, and Los Angeles police detectives said there could be more victims. Antonio Gomez, 35, of Downey was arrested March 6 after a monthlong investigation, said Det. Kathie McCarthy of the Robbery-Homicide Division. Formal charges are pending, but Gomez has been accused of committing lewd acts with a child younger than 14 and is free on $100,000 bail, police said.

A Costa Mesa middle school student could be expelled and is being investigated by police for threatening to kill a classmate in a posting on a popular website, officials said Thursday. "Going into a situation like this, we are concerned about the safety of all of our kids," said Bob Metz, Newport-Mesa Unified School District's assistant superintendent of secondary education. "We need to make sure we take the proper action to make sure our kids are safe."

About $110 million in school construction projects promised to Anaheim voters when they approved a bond measure in 2002 will be abandoned because of a funding shortfall caused by mismanagement, Anaheim Union High School District officials said Thursday. The shortfall, identified last year by auditors who found that the district's construction program was rife with overspending and lack of oversight, will scuttle renovations to three aging high schools and six junior highs.

Junior high schools in the Israeli-occupied West Bank will be reopened today, allowing about 70,000 more Palestinian children to return to classes, the Israeli army announced. The junior high schools have been closed since January. Primary schools and classes for high school seniors reopened July 22, and 200,000 students returned to classes.

The Fullerton Athletic Alliance, an organization that raises funds to assist the Fullerton School District's after-school sports program, has donated $3,000 to help Fullerton's three junior high schools participate in the North Orange County Athletic League. John Charlton, director of the league, said the money will be used to purchase uniforms, soccer nets, paint to mark fields and chalk for the track fields at Nicolas, D. Russell Parks and Ladera Vista junior high schools.

It was intended to be a rigorous lesson on the complexities of ratios and cross multiplication. But some of the students in teacher Yong Li She's sixth-grade math class had other ideas. One boy threw balls of paper. Another put a sticker on his forehead while the girls next to him giggled. "I got a D in this class," he shouted to a classmate. "That's better than you!" The Virgil Middle School teacher forged on. It was all just part of teaching math at the messy crossroads of middle school.

Every one of the 700 students at John F. Kennedy Middle School, 10 miles from the Mexican border, receives free or discounted lunches because of their families' low incomes, and two-thirds have limited English skills. The El Centro campus offers after-school and Saturday classes for students falling behind and evening computer lab hours for students and parents. The school holds evening workshops so parents can learn about homework expectations and the college application process.